Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  Hunched over, frowning, chewing on his lip, Miguel studied the photo for what felt like a full minute before passing it back to the sheriff.

  “¿Es este el hombre qúe vió matar a Héctor Valenzuela y Reynaldo Guzmán?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Sí, es él,” replied Miguel, who underwent a sudden transformation. His grimace faded, he stopped biting his lip, and he straightened his shoulders. “Yo lo vi dispararles con la pistola.” Extending his arm, he pulled an imaginary trigger. “¡Boom! ¡Boom! Así. Primero Héctor y luego Reynaldo. ¡Boom! ¡Boom!”

  “¿Estás seguro?”

  “¡Sí! ¡Sí! Estoy seguero. El hombre en la foto es el que mató a mis amigos.”

  Castle was amazed by the change in Miguel. He seemed to have come to terms, to have resigned himself to his situation, and to have found in the resignation the resolve to see the thing through.

  The sheriff questioned him some more—Castle could not follow the conversation—then gave the case file to Soto. “How about that, Mke? Looks like we’ve got a suspect. Miguel said he would identify him at a lineup. Let’s get a warrant and issue a BOL. Anything on the license tags?”

  “The van’s registered to a guy in Phoenix,” Soto replied. “Nothing on him, but I’ll ask Phoenix to check.”

  Rodriguez turned to Blaine and Castle. “Did you get a look at the piece he was carrying?”

  “Just the grips,” answered Blaine. “A semiauto of some kind.”

  “Ballistics tests show the slugs came from a forty-caliber, probably a Ruger. Don’t know for sure. Slugs were pretty damaged. If we pop this guy, I’d sure love to get my hands on his pistol. What we’ve got now in the way of forensic evidence is one step above pure shit.”

  Soto snickered. “And two steps above is eyewitness testimony. It’s wrong fifty percent of the time.”

  “The suspense is killin’ me,” said Blaine. “Who are you lookin’ for?”

  “Name’s William Cruz,” the sheriff said. “The broken nose jogged my memory. I arrested him first time about ten years ago. Assault and battery. Cruz used to be a prizefighter and sometimes forgot when he was out of the ring. In ’ninety-seven we busted him again for dealing meth. Got four years in Florence. Did two and a half, the rest on probation.”

  Blaine traded glances with Castle. “He’s called Billy Cruz?”

  “Guess so,” said Rodriguez. “Why?”

  “Last month a guy I know in the Border Patrol told me this Cruz runs a wetback smuggling ring, that he’s been crossin’ illegals through our place.”

  “No shit. Wish they’d passed that on to us. Mike, make sure the BOL gets to the Border Patrol,” he said to Soto, then returned his attentions to Blaine and Castle. “Don’t go blabbing this around. It’s a small county, and if Cruz hears there’s a warrant out on him, he’ll head south. And if you see him again, call me or Mike right away and leave him alone. This isn’t somebody you want to mess with.”

  21

  CURSED, thought The Professor, watching the endless miles of mesquite chaparral roll by. So far from God, so near the United States, a land cursed by geography—flat, dry, sun-bleached, promising nothing, yielding nothing—and by history, the “Route of the Missions” the guidebooks called this stretch of northern Sonora for the padres who trekked its wastes to build churches and save Yaqui and Pima souls so they would fly straight into the arms of God when they died, laboring in gold and silver mines to fill the treasuries of Spanish kings. Agave stalks stood like sentinels against the purpling sky, barbed paddles of prickly pear waited to afflict migrants trundling toward the border, and a moon halfway up the sky blanched the landscape, heightening its desolation. It looked like a vast plain whitened by a rain of salt and ash.

  The Professor could smell that pallid light, and the color of the sky, for he was on a fine edge, a very fine edge, his senses commingling, the boundaries between them blurred. Ahead, the tour bus’s taillights glowed in the darkness, and he smelled them, too, smelled their redness that is, while he saw the perfume of creosote the air-conditioning ducts sucked into the car—it was a shimmering blue trapezoid. His gift, multisensory awareness, perceiving reality in all its dimensions.

  Félix, who was driving, made a visor with his hand against the glare of an oncoming car’s brights, the first car they’d seen since leaving Magdalena, twenty minutes ago. Few motorists traveled these parts at night. Even the federal highway was almost as deserted as a country road.

  The Professor looked at the cameraman, riding in the backseat, a video camera on his lap. “We’ll pull them over in a minute. Stay in the car till I signal you.”

  He flipped a hand to acknowledge his instructions. Like Félix, he had been handpicked for tonight’s operation. Both had served in the Special Air Mobile Battalion, and two of their former comrades had been featured victims in the Golden Roosters’ hit DVD, which they had watched last week with The Professor, Comandante Zaragoza, and Joaquín Carrasco in the salon of Joaquín’s fishing yacht in San Carlos harbor. If they had lacked motivation, the final sequence, the video showing the execution of their old captain, supplied more than enough. The Professor tried to look at matters dispassionately, analytically. Here was a new thing in the cartel wars. Besos para mis enemigos. The DVD was like those videos of beheadings and assassinations that al Qaeda threw out to the world to show what they were capable of, but far more sophisticated, even artful. Yvonne Menéndez had borrowed a page from the Islamist terrorists and improved on it, adding her own embellishments. Butchery set to music.

  Joaquín had been dealt an insult he could not ignore. He had to retaliate. The Professor understood that; nonetheless, he’d argued against the means of reprisal that Joaquín chose, pointing out that the escalating violence had moved the U.S. State Department to issue travel warnings to its citizens to avoid the border. The tourist trade was suffering, Joaquín’s legitimate enterprises were losing money. What he wanted done would probably worsen the situation. “You know, El Profesor,” he’d said in a fatherly tone, “sometimes I think there is too much Anglo in your blood. You are too cold. You fail to understand that there are times when avenging one’s honor is more important than money.” A little slap on the wrist, but its meaning was plain enough: Joaquín wanted a massacre sufficiently spectacular to deter any more corridistas from lending their talents to Yvonne or any of his other rivals.

  “¿Félix, listos?”

  “Siempre,” he replied, in an uninflected tone.

  The Professor slapped the police light on the dash and turned it on. Félix swung out over the center line so the bus driver would see it flashing and pull off, but the bus kept going. Félix flicked the switch for the siren and gave it a couple of whoops, then switched it off as brakelights winked ahead and the bus—really a yacht-size recreational vehicle—rolled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.

  Félix pulled up several yards behind and left the light flashing to deter any Good Samaritans from stopping to assist what appeared to be a stranded vehicle. He and The Professor donned ski masks, in the unlikely event someone escaped. A car approached, eastbound. They waited till it passed, then jumped out, each armed with a silenced Tec-9 submachine gun, and hurried alongside the bus in a crouch. Slanting letters painted in sparkly gold spelled LOS GALLOS DE ORO—The Golden Roosters—on a side panel below the windows, in which subdued lights glowed.

  The Professor banged on the forward door. “Judicial! Open up!”

  “What is it? What is the trouble?” came a voice from inside.

  “We are federal police! We have authorization to search this bus! Now open up, or there will be trouble!”

  More voices. Then the driver opened the door. The Professor shot him twice, the reports sounding like popping champagne corks. He and Félix quickly stepped over the body, hopped up a step, and swung the submachine guns toward the rear lounge, where Víctor Castillo, his manager, his sidemen, and a couple of the band’s girlfriends leaped from their seats, the flicker of a TV set attached
to the roof playing across their stunned faces. One of the women screamed an instant before the two men opened fire in disciplined bursts, sweeping the muzzles back and forth. So much popping of champagne corks, it sounded like New Year’s Eve. Bodies crashed to the floor and tumbled across the seats; bullets tore chunks out of the fake wood paneling, ripped holes in the vinyl seat cushions. Castillo, struck in the chest, was slammed against the bathroom door and slid to the floor. A sideman, a sleek gourd of a man, lunged for a window and died as he clawed at the glass. It was over in fifteen seconds. Félix jerked a pair of hospital slippers from his jacket pocket, covered his shoes, stepped into the pooling blood, and put a round into each head with his pistol. While he administered the coups de grâce, The Professor found the switch for the overhead lights on the instrument panel. The cameraman would need them for his cinematography.

  “Which one is Castillo?” Félix called from the rear.

  A little out of breath, The Professor pointed to the long, gaunt figure sprawled beneath the bathroom door. Castillo had a face that could have been painted by El Greco, a face whose lineaments, to The Professor, had texture—yes, he could feel its shape and the shape of the body on the tips of his fingers. At once smooth and rough, like a statue carved from wood. The statue of a saint, for Castillo looked like a martyred saint lying there full of holes, though writing a narco-corrido in honor of Yvonne Menéndez probably would disqualify him for canonization.

  With a magician’s flourish, Félix whipped out a sheet of printer paper bearing a message—“To Yvonne. From Your Enemies”—fixed it to an ice pick, and plunged the ice pick into Castillo’s chest.

  Breathless still—it had been years since he’d pulled a trigger; he was, so to speak, out of operational condition—The Professor went outside and waved to the videographer to come in and start filming.

  “Five minutes, no more. Make sure you get closeups of each one, and the sign.”

  He and Félix, green eyes expressionless, stood back while the videographer panned and zoomed. The scene had a malignant beauty; the Golden Roosters’ gold lamé shirts, drenched in red, were especially vivid. But this carnage wasn’t art. Killing a dangerous adversary with one shot at close range was art. This was a typical Mexican festival of gore, the sort of mess The Professor abhorred. Extreme provocation, he supposed, called for an extreme response. Still, the violation of his aesthetics revolted him. He called Joaquín on his mobile.

  “Hola. The concert has been canceled,” he said.

  Ben Erskine

  Transcript 4—T.J. Babcock

  One of the other times I talked to you, I told you that my wife had got religion to make up for the wrongs she done in the Revolution. Well, as time went on, she got more and more that way. Mass every day. Rosaries. In 1927 or about then I got a job as the foreman of a big ranch in the Altar Valley near to the town of Altar. I was paid good wages, but it still wasn’t a whole lot when you’ve got five mouths to feed. Three girls, two boys. After number four I had told Ynez, “That’s enough,” but she would not hear of it. The Church said it was a mortal sin to stop babies from a-coming into the world, so right quick we had número cinco, another girl. Ynez had pretty much forgot about building a new Mexico and had got herself drunk on religion, and her bootlegger was the padre of the church over in Altar, Father Torres.

  She got mixed up with the Cristeros. Maybe you heard of them. Folks who rebelled against the government on account of it had come down real hard on the Church, pretty much made outlaws out of padres and nuns. Things got right nasty, like they always do in Old Mexico. Federal soldiers arrested padres and a lot of times executed them right in front of their congregations. The padres fought back, a few of them even formed their own armies. You know how it is when folks decide they are fighting for the Lord Almighty. Some of these Cristero rebels raided public schools and hanged the teachers and pinned signs to them that said “Viva Cristo Rey.”

  Ynez didn’t take no part in that kind of bloodiness, but she did go to secret meetings at Father Torres’s church, and he got her to organize peons and vaqueros in and around town not to buy things at the store and not to send their kids to the public schools. Ynez and me had a couple knock-down drag-outs about this, but Ynez being Ynez, she wouldn’t listen to my good sense for her to stop those activities.

  So 1928 come along. Obregón was going to be made el presidente, but one of them crazy Cristeros assassinated him. The government really come down hard then, executing Cristeros and arresting the ones they didn’t shoot, and Ynez was one that got arrested.

  The prison was south of Altar and just as terrible and filthy as you would expect. First time I visited her there, I saw straw dummies against a wall for the firing squads to practice on, and a lot of bloodstains and bullet holes for when they wasn’t practicing. They had another way of executing prisoners. They would starve them for days and not give them nothing to drink. Then when they were hungry enough to eat their shoes and thirsty enough to drink their own pee, they’d be fed all the tortillas and beans and water they could hold. The food would form a big glob in their bellies and bung them up, and they would die of a busted gut.

  I didn’t know where to turn. Ben and me had stayed in touch and I wrote him about my predicament. He wrote back and said, “We’ve got to get her out of there,” and that he was going to contact our old colonel, Bracamonte, to find out if he could help. That man had done survived all the changes in government and now was a lieutenant general with some high-flown job in the Ministry of War. I didn’t have much hope. You will remember that the colonel did not have a high opinion of the Church.

  I didn’t hear a thing for a long spell. There I was, trying to run a big ranch and raise up five niños and niñas all on my own and my wife in jail. Then a telegram come for me at the telegraph office in Altar. It was from the man himself, and it said I was to meet him at the prison on such and such a date. Near as I remember, it was middle of ’29. We met in the warden’s office, alone. It was a military prison and Bracamonte had told the warden to get lost for a spell. I hadn’t seen the colonel in years, and he sure had changed, was getting on in years and going bald, and what he’d lost in hair he’d put on in flesh. He would have looked like a right prosperous businessman if it hadn’t been for his uniform. He still had that big mustache, but it was gray now instead of black.

  He didn’t waste much time talking old times. Told me he’d heard from Ben, and sure, he could get Ynez out, but I had to do him a favor first, a big one. He laid it out. The new presidente, Calles, had done a few things that had not pleased some folks in the army, colonels and generals, and they had started a revolt. This bunch of officers had sent two men into the U.S. of A. to buy arms and ammunition and smuggle them into Mexico.

  These two men were the colonels Hilario Pedroza and Nicolas López. They was operating in Nogales, the American side, and the government wanted them nabbed and turned over to the military authorities in Mexico. But on account of there wasn’t an extradition treaty, the American government couldn’t hand them over.

  Then Bracamonte folded his hands on his considerable belly and said, “You, Babcock, will assist us in capturing these traitors.” I about fell off my chair. How was I to do what the whole damn American government could not do? And he said, “Our friend, Don Benjamín, will apprehend them and turn them over to us. He is a sheriff. Certainly he can find a reason to arrest them.” You mean, I asked him, that Ben’s agreed to do this? And he said, “Don Benjamín is once more in my debt. Six years ago I helped him remove an American criminal from Mexico. Now he is to help me remove Mexican criminals from America. And you will help him.”

  I remembered all the fuss about Ben taking a murderer out of Nogales that some folks said was a Mexican citizen. I didn’t know Bracamonte had had a hand in that. He said that Calles himself had authorized him to pay a reward for the job, a hundred thousand pesos to each one of us.

  I come a little closer to falling off my chair, but I gave him a yes. He hand
ed me a file with photos of López and Pedroza and some information about them, and said that Ben and me wasn’t to worry about getting into trouble. Our names was to be kept secret, it was going to look like the two traitors had crossed into Mexico on their gun-running business and got nabbed by the Mexican army.

  Ben couldn’t ask a regular deputy to give him a hand. This here business was to be done on the sly in off-duty hours. He knew that using his badge to nab people for a foreign government was going over the line. But he had him a code—a man does you one, you do him one if he asks. And then there was me and Ynez—we were his old compas from the Revolution, and he couldn’t let us down.

  Me, I thought it was kinda peculiar. Years before, Bracamonte had paid us to smuggle guns into Mexico, now we was going to be paid to collar two fellas for doing the same thing. But that is the way of things in Mexico. The man who’s your friend today could be your enemy tomorrow.

  I got a room in the Montezuma Hotel on Grand. Ben set up a surveillance. López and Pedroza had a front, an import-export business, in a produce warehouse a ways up on Grand from my hotel. They was renting a house on Noon Hill with two gals I am right sure they were not married to. Ben and me would follow them sometimes in Ben’s Model T, the two of us dressed to look like cowhands, which was easy for me, me being one. One night we tailed a truck from the warehouse way out into the desert—the Old Yaqui Trail that we knew like you do your own backyard—and saw an off-load of crates and Yaqui packing the crates onto burros. Like nothing had changed since 1915, except that now we was on the other side of the fence. Ben still had friends among the Yaqui, and later on got one of them to confirm that, sure, they were smuggling guns for López and Pedroza.

  Another thing we found out—the colonels loved the picture show. Them and their whores went to the movie house downtown about every other night. We reckoned they’d seen the same double feature three times. Ben said, “That’s where we’ll nab them, when they’re coming out of the movies.” He set it up for a Wednesday night. Funny how I remember that, a Wednesday night.